Willett, who died at his home near near Bromley in Kent, is commemorated for his efforts by a memorial sundial in nearby Petts Wood, set permanently to Daylight Saving Time.
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The Home Office put out special posters telling people how to reset their clocks to GMT and national newspapers also gave advice. Instead, owners had to put the clock forward by 11 hours when Summer Time came to an end on October 1 1916. The Summer Time Act of 1916 was quickly passed by Parliament and the first day of British Summer Time, May 21 1916, was widely reported in the press.īack then the hands on many of the clocks could not be turned back without breaking the mechanism. Sadly, he died of the flu in 1915, at the age of 58 a year before Germany adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30 1916, when the clocks were put forward at 11pm.īritain followed suit a month later on May 21, and Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey all followed.īy then Britain and Germany had been fighting each other in the First World War (1914-18), and a system that could take pressure off the economy and conserve fuel was worth trying.
He spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one. However, his idea was ridiculed and the Daylight Saving Bill got nowhere in Parliament when it was introduced in 1909. He proposed that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in four incremental steps during April and reversed the same way during September. Willett published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the nation’s clocks, arguing it would not only improve health and happiness but it would save the country £2.5 million. Back then the clocks were set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) meaning it was light by 3am and dark at 9pm midsummer. Daylight Saving Time: Whose idea was it?Įdwardian builder William Willett introduced the idea of British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, in 1907.Ĭoincidentally, Willett is a great-great-grandfather of Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin.Ī keen supporter of the outdoors, he noticed that during the summer people were still asleep when the sun had risen and wanted to stop Brits from wasting valuable daylight hours. On the shortest day, Tuesday December 21, this will dwindle to around just seven hours and 49 minutes. In the UK the longest day - also known as the summer solstice - fell on June 21 with 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight.
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